IN THE acknowledgments to this enthusiastic, heroically researched biography of Julia Child, Bob Spitz explains that he got to know his subject during a jaunt around Sicily lasting several weeks, and found her “exactly like her TV persona: warm, funny, outgoing, whip-smart, incorrigible and, most of all, real. If I have to admit to one prejudice confronting this book it is that I had a powerful crush on her. Sorry. Deal with it.” Join the queue, Mr Spitz.

Julia (it seems odd to call her anything else) had that effect on many people. Unlike the prefabricated, brand-conscious hosts of contemporary America’s popular food shows—smirking, mugging Guy Fieri, swooning Padma Lakshmi, grumpy Tom Colicchio—there was something eminently jaunty and intimate about Julia. She did not preen, bluster, condescend or intimidate; instead, she just spoke to her viewers, in much the same unfussy, confident way that Elizabeth David did on the page. What David did for Britain with Mediterranean food, Julia Child did for America with French cuisine.

Like David, Julia McWilliams was born in the 20th century’s second decade to a wealthy family and was completely uninterested in the social role laid out for her. She was an indifferent student at Smith College, though as one of her advisers noted, “She will not need ‘a job’, I do not believe.” And indeed, she avoided one for years, living the high life in her native southern California before turning serious when America entered the second world war. In 1942, when she was 30 years old and resolutely husbandless, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

Having ventured out of the United States precisely once (and then only to Tijuana), she was posted first to India and then to Ceylon, where she met a bristly aesthete ten years her senior named Paul Child. Paul was withdrawn and reserved where Julia was ebullient and outgoing, but they shared a certain frankness and, as it happened, a love of food—a passion they discovered in each other in China, where, to escape the horrible army slop, they ate their way around Kunming.

Julia did not get to Paris until 1948, when Paul’s civil-service job moved them there. She was then 36, without a career but with what Mr Spitz calls “a burning ambition to do something useful”. It took a sole—sparkling fresh, cooked simply in brown butter with nothing more than “a discreet splash of lemon and a dusting of parsley”—to direct her ambition. She enrolled in cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, where she realised that French cuisine was not about national origin, or some mythical connection to la France profonde: it was about technique. And technique could be learned and eventually mastered, even by an awkward, six-foot-three-inch housewife from suburban Los Angeles.

Just over a decade after her first Cordon Bleu class, Julia gave a demonstration on a staid programme on Boston public television called “People Are Reading”. She had never been on television before. She made an omelette. Looking on, quite bewildered, as the programme’s host, was a university professor who was more accustomed to discussing books for a small, refined audience composed of other university professors. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mr Spitz goes beyond mere history and provides a full, human portrait of Julia. This is no hagiography: she could be prickly, stubborn and unsentimental to the point of coldness. She was also delightfully foul-mouthed (to a protégée having trouble with Madeleine Kamman, a French chef whom Julia particularly disliked, she advised, “You need to follow my advice. Just call her up and say, ‘Madeleine, fuck you!’”), and fond of her wine. Mr Spitz offers the reader a portrait of an epicure, and of a life profoundly full, blessed and well lived.